Incident management

This chapter examines incident management, in particular scene/s management. With much of the focus of emergency response agencies such as police and fire services concentrated on the scene and its management, consideration of the variables such as events that do not have scenes, or where there are multiple or poorly defined scenes. For example, pandemics occur across the broad community and are often not localised. Similarly heat waves will affect the entire community and not be localised. For events with a clearly defined scene (e.g. a bus crash) effective scene management and dispersal of the injured is critical to the optimal outcomes for those involved. Equally the systems and structures that underpin that effective management must be familiar to the response agencies. Thus disaster incident management should be the same as routine incident management with capacity to surge response capability to meet the particular needs of an individual event. The first step in incident management is to identify the authority, roles and responsibilities, response management systems and evaluation and reporting arrangements. This should be done prior to any event and would be informed by local legislation or regulations. The chapter also examines incident management systems, obstacles and issues to successful implementation, levels of response – strategic, tactical and operational, and management of volunteers